Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Meta had ended its pilot program for Novi, the company’s digital wallet, which was the last piece of Meta’s troubled cryptocurrency project.
As explained on Novi’s website, Meta has announced that the wallet will be shutting down on September 1, 2022 and that users need to withdraw their funds as soon as possible.
Starting July 21st, Novi users will no longer be able to add money to their accounts when they lose access to their accounts in September.
A Meta spokesperson says that if a user forgets to withdraw their remaining balance, the company will attempt to transfer the remaining balance to the bank account or debit card they entered as their payment method.
In October last year, Meta launched a small pilot of Novi to users in the US and Guatemala. When Novi was founded, the company planned to use its cryptocurrency, Diem, to support free and fast transactions.
However, regulatory concerns forced the company to partner with Coinbase to use the PAXOS stablecoin instead, which has a Meta-backed value. Despite Meta’s assurances that it would add support for Diem at a later date, things started crumbling during the last few months of 2021 and early 2022. This resulted in the cancellation of the project.
Not long ago, Diem took the name LIBRA before it came to be associated with Facebook’s parent company, Meta. Libra was criticized for its ties to Facebook, so the independent group behind the project rebranded it to Diem to distance itself from the social network.
As soon as the Novi project was launched in October 2021, US senators demanded that Meta shut down the project, citing that the company cannot be trusted to manage cryptocurrency all on its own.
David Marcus, who headed Meta’s cryptocurrency projects, left the company one month later. As part of the completion of the project, Diem sold its assets in early 2022 for around $200 million.
While Meta is testing NFTs (non-fungible tokens) on Instagram and recently rolled out support for NFTs on Facebook for select US creators, according to reports, the company is also working on a cryptocurrency not based on blockchain called Zuck Bucks.
As well as this, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that his company would create a digital wallet so you can manage and store “digital clothing, art, videos, music, experiences, and virtual events, among others.” The wallet would be accessible across different metaverse experiences, reflecting the Metaverse Standards Forum that Meta helped form.
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